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This blog was used to support the Evidence, Impact, Metrics work which took place in 2010-2011. After the completion of this work, the blog was closed and no further posts will be made.

Summary of Blog Posts

Blogs Posts about Evidence of Impact

A series of evidence-based blog posts have been published on the UK Web Focus blog in order to support UKOLN’s Impact, Evidence, metrics work. A summary of the posts is given below.

Nudge: Improving Decisions About RSS Usage, 13 July 20008. This post described how the ‘nudge’ principle of using evidence of failures to implement best practices can be used as an approach to encourage, rather than mandate, implementation of best practices. This approach was applied in the context of a survey of RSS usage across Scottish university home pages. This post has had 1,387 views and has attracted 8 comments to date.

The Decline in JISCMail Use Across the Web Management Community, 4 June 2010. This post depicts the sharp decline in use of JISCMail by the Web management community over the past 5 years and suggests that this evidence indicates the need to understand changing patterns in use of communication channels. This post has had 817 views and has attracted 14 comments to date.

Planet Facebook Becomes Less of a Walled Garden, 8 Oct 2010. This post was published shortly after Facebook announced that users could download their data from the service and, in light of this news, document growth in Facebook usage by early institutional adopters of the service. This post has had 704 views and has attracted 7 comments to date.

How is the UK HE Sector Using YouTube?, 18 Oct 2010. This survey provided a snapshop of usage figures for 15 UK institutions which have YouTube Edu accounts. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 1,211 views and has attracted 11 comments to date.

What are UK Universities doing with iTunes U?, 25 Oct 2010. This survey provided a snapshop of usage figures for 10 UK institutions which have official iTunesU accounts. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 852 views and has attracted 5 comments to date.

HTML and RDFa Analysis of Welsh University Home Pages, 17 Nov 2010. This survey provided a snapshop of usage of HTML and RDFa usage on 11 Welsh institutional home pages. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments and may be relevant in providing supporting evidence of the effectiveness of JISC-funded work to encourage take-up of RDFa. This post has had 476 views and has attracted 3 comments to date.

Trends For University Web Site Search Engines, 15 Dec 2010. This post reviews surveys of search engine usage carried out in 1999 and makes comparisons with a survey of the 20 Russell Group Universities today. This show a move from a diversity of solutions to majority use of a Google product. This post has had 789 views and has attracted 12 comments to date.

Evidence of Personal Usage Of Social Web Services, 12 Jan 2011. This post illustrates how trend analyses across personal use of services can help to provide new personal insights and also understand drivers which can help take-up of services beyond early adopters (including deployment of better clients, uses which demonstrate value such as use at events and achieving a critical size for a community). This post has had 572 views and has attracted 8 comments to date.

Institutional Use of Twitter by Russell Group Universities, 14 Jan 2011. This survey provided a snapshop of institutional use of Twitter across the 20 Russell Group Universities. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 3,473 views and has attracted 10 comments to date.

Use of Facebook by Russell Group Universities, 18 Jan 2011. This survey provided a snapshop of institutional use of Facebook across 20 Russell Group Universities. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 1,651 views and has attracted 9 comments to date.

Assessing the Value of a Tweet, 1 Feb 2011. This post provides an example of the impact which a single tweet can have and documents methods for ensuring that such use can be monitored and recorded. This post has had 466 views to date and has attracted 1 comment to date.

Institutional Use of Twitter by the 1994 Group of UK Universities, 22 Feb 2011. This survey provided a snapshop of institutional use of Twitter across the 18 1994 Group Universities. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 983 views and has attracted 10 comments to date.

How Do We Measure the Effectiveness of Institutional Repositories?, 24 Feb 2011. This post described how metrics could be used to provide a partial answer to the question “how do we measure the effectiveness of an institutional repository?” posed on the JISC-Repositories list. The post highlighted UKOLN’s RepUK work which has harvested metadata records which can help provide answers to this question. This post has had 1,501 views and has attracted 9 comments to date.

Using Slideshare as a Tool to Help Identify Impact, 6 May 2011. This post documented how UKOLN responded to a request to “provide evidence of the impact of the JISC PoWR project” and illustrated how usage statistics could provide useful indicators, especially if complemented by anecdotal evidence which may be provided on Web 2.0 repository services such as Slideshare which permit comments and the content to be embedded elsewhere. This post has had 433 views and has attracted 7 comments to date.

Privacy Settings For UK Russell Group University Home Pages, 24 May 2011. This survey provided a snapshot of cookie use across the 20 Russell Group Universities. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 709 views and has attracted 11 comments to date.

Evidence of Slideshare’s Impact, 31 May 2011. This post provided evidence of access to presentations delivered at IWMW events for slides hosted on Slideshare. The evidence shows that there have been over 238,000 views of the slides. The post suggested reasons for the popularity of the most widely-viewed slides and suggested that there is a need for data-mining of usage statistics for slide repositories across a wider range of events. Note that this post has had 466 views and has attracted 2 comments to date.

A Pilot Survey of the Numbers of Full-Text Items in Institutional Repositories, 6 June 2011. This survey sought to provide a snapshop of the numbers of full-text items available provided in Russell Group University repositories. However it was found that only a very small number of repositories provided the capabilities for such analysis. Note that this post has had 807 views and has attracted 13 comments to date.

Evidence For The #UniWeek Campaign, 19 June 2011. This post described ways of gathering evidence and measuring effectiveness of advocacy campaigns. This post has had 336 views and has attracted 2 comments to date.

Social Analytics for Russell Group University Twitter Accounts, 28 June 2011. This survey provided a snapshop of institutional use of Twitter across the 20 Russell Group Universities using several social analytics tools in order to gain a better understanding of the strengths and weakness of such tools. This post provides a documented benchmark which can be used to compare with future developments. This post has had 1,008 views and has attracted 4 comments to date.

What Can We Learn From Download Statistics for Institutional Repositories?, 6 July 2011. This post provided a brief analysis of download statistics for the University of Bath institutional repository and discussed whether local cultural factors may be responsible for unexpected findings (e.g. the most downloaded contributors were based along the same corridor). This post has had 583 views and has attracted 6 comments to date.

Is It Now Time to Embed Use of Google+?, 21 Sept 2011. This post drew parallels of the slow growth in usage of Google+ and similar usage patterns with Twitter. This post has had 508 views and has attracted 9 comments to date.

Are University Web Sites in Decline?, 20 Oct 2011. The post described use of two trend analysis services which suggested that traffic to Russell Group University Web sites may be in decline. This post has had 890 views and has attracted 14 comments to date.

How People Find This Blog, Five Years On, 1 Nov 2011. This post documented the referrer traffic to the UK Web Focus blog over five years which highlighted the increasing importance of Twitter. This post has had 408 views and has attracted 13 comments to date.

Google Scholar Citations and Metadata Quality, 28 Nov 2011. This survey described how visualisation tools for citation services can help to spot errors in the metadata. This post has had 348 views and has attracted 1 comment to date.

Paradata for Online Surveys, 29 Nov 2011. This post described how quantitative evidence gathered for recent surveys of use Google Scholar Citations could be affected by the how searches were carried out. The need to document the survey paradata was highlighted. This post has had 244 views to date.

Paper on Metrics Accepted, 5 Dec 2011. This post announced that a paper of Web accessibility metrics had been accepted for publication. The paper drew parallels with metrics for research citations, online reputation and Web accessibility and argued that whilst all approaches have limitations, there are also advantages in gathering and using metrics in these areas, provided their limitations are understood. This post has had 224 views to date.

Summary

Details of 35 posts are listed which were published on the UK Web Focus blog between 4 June 2010 and 14 December 2011 plus an additional post published in July 2008. These posts are available in the Evidence category of the UK Web Focus blog at the URL <http://ukwebfocus.wordpress.com/category/evidence/>.

Note that by 13 December 2011 there had been 28,5907 views of these posts. In addition there had been 275 comments. Note, however, that the numbers for the comments include trackbacks and may also contain automatically-generated links from other WordPress blogs which may subsequently be deleted.